Augmented Vision 2.0http://www.augmented-vision.net
I am a prototype for a much larger systemMon, 17 Dec 2018 05:03:37 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.1http://www.augmented-vision.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/avatar1_Darwinia-66x66.jpgAugmented Vision 2.0http://www.augmented-vision.net
3232Librarians by day, opinionated millenials by night, best friends Joanna Price and Dylan Holmes present A Possibility of Opinions, a celebration of friendship, media, and dumb jokes. Every month, our hosts will wrestle with the complexities of modern life; share their favorite books, movies, and games; and divine how to have a problem-free video call.Augmented Vision 2.0cleanepisodicAugmented Vision 2.0aerothorn@gmail.comaerothorn@gmail.com (Augmented Vision 2.0)A celebration of friendship, stories, and intellectual curiousityAugmented Vision 2.0http://www.augmented-vision.net/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/podcast_logo.jpghttp://www.augmented-vision.net
89436027100 Favorite Filmshttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/11/25/100-favorite-films/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/11/25/100-favorite-films/#respondSun, 25 Nov 2018 05:42:11 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=12018These are my hundred favorite feature films, as of November 2018, presented unranked in alphabetical order. A few notes: Only feature films are included (including full-length documentaries, but excluding short films and miniseries) I have not see most films in the world; by my reckoning I’ve watched about 700, so this list is far [...]

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/11/25/100-favorite-films/feed/012018A Possibility of Opinions, Episode 3: Opposed to Corporeal Realityhttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/11/23/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-3-opposed-to-corporeal-reality/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/11/23/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-3-opposed-to-corporeal-reality/#respondFri, 23 Nov 2018 03:21:55 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=12014In this jam-packed episode, Joanna gives her thoughts on the video game Tacoma, while Dylan present his "Homecoming" media list. JP Achievements are introduced, and our hosts discuss the unnerving revelations in Democracy for Realists. Two new regular podcast sections (Song Break and Joke of the Month) premier, and the Game Corner and Book Nook [...]

]]>In this jam-packed episode, Joanna gives her thoughts on the video game Tacoma, while Dylan present his “Homecoming” media list. JP Achievements are introduced, and our hosts discuss the unnerving revelations in Democracy for Realists. Two new regular podcast sections (Song Break and Joke of the Month) premier, and the Game Corner and Book Nook segments continue. Also, Dylan finally gets a recording of Joanna saying “I’m so dumb,” much to her chagrin.

JP Assignments for this episode: Tacoma by Fulbright, a curated list by Dylan (linked next episode to avoid spoilers).

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/11/23/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-3-opposed-to-corporeal-reality/feed/0In this jam-packed episode, Joanna gives her thoughts on the video game Tacoma, while Dylan present his “Homecoming” media list. JP Achievements are introduced, and our hosts discuss the unnerving revelations in Democracy for Realists.In this jam-packed episode, Joanna gives her thoughts on the video game Tacoma, while Dylan present his “Homecoming” media list. JP Achievements are introduced, and our hosts discuss the unnerving revelations in Democracy for Realists. Two new regular podcast sections (Song Break and Joke of the Month) premier, and the Game Corner and Book Nook segments […]Augmented Vision 2.0clean2:10:1412014A Possibility of Opinions, Episode 2: What If There Are No Witnesses?http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/10/12/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-2-what-if-there-are-no-witnesses/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/10/12/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-2-what-if-there-are-no-witnesses/#respondFri, 12 Oct 2018 19:03:12 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=11993In episode 2, Joanna & Dylan launch the new Just Points system; discuss what it takes to be a public librarian; and cement Dylan’s Game Corner, Joanna’s Book Club, and Media Club as regular sections. Joanna questions why golf caddies reside in a shack, and Dylan takes a call from his mom. Featuring new and [...]

]]>In episode 2, Joanna & Dylan launch the new Just Points system; discuss what it takes to be a public librarian; and cement Dylan’s Game Corner, Joanna’s Book Club, and Media Club as regular sections. Joanna questions why golf caddies reside in a shack, and Dylan takes a call from his mom. Featuring new and improved sound mixing!

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/10/12/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-2-what-if-there-are-no-witnesses/feed/0In episode 2, Joanna & Dylan launch the new Just Points system; discuss what it takes to be a public librarian; and cement Dylan’s Game Corner, Joanna’s Book Club, and Media Club as regular sections. Joanna questions why golf caddies reside in a shack,...In episode 2, Joanna & Dylan launch the new Just Points system; discuss what it takes to be a public librarian; and cement Dylan’s Game Corner, Joanna’s Book Club, and Media Club as regular sections. Joanna questions why golf caddies reside in a shack, and Dylan takes a call from his mom. Featuring new and improved […]Augmented Vision 2.0clean1:49:5311993A Possibility of Opinions, Episode 1: Begin the Beginhttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/09/03/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-1-begin-the-begin/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/09/03/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-1-begin-the-begin/#respondMon, 03 Sep 2018 04:38:08 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=11967In the pilot episode of A Possibility of Opinions, listeners get two whole hours of the very particular humor Joanna and Dylan share, as they discuss games, books, politics, life, and how Patrick Stewart is still sexy. NB: This episode was recorded on location with a single mic, so please forgive some audio wonkiness. Future [...]

]]>In the pilot episode of A Possibility of Opinions, listeners get two whole hours of the very particular humor Joanna and Dylan share, as they discuss games, books, politics, life, and how Patrick Stewart is still sexy.

NB: This episode was recorded on location with a single mic, so please forgive some audio wonkiness. Future episodes will show improvement as our bumbling hosts figure out podcasting.

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/09/03/a-possibility-of-opinions-episode-1-begin-the-begin/feed/0In the pilot episode of A Possibility of Opinions, listeners get two whole hours of the very particular humor Joanna and Dylan share, as they discuss games, books, politics, life, and how Patrick Stewart is still sexy.In the pilot episode of A Possibility of Opinions, listeners get two whole hours of the very particular humor Joanna and Dylan share, as they discuss games, books, politics, life, and how Patrick Stewart is still sexy. NB: This episode was recorded on location with a single mic, so please forgive some audio wonkiness. Future episodes […]Augmented Vision 2.0clean2:06:4811967Building a New Podcast, Part 3: Antiperformativityhttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/02/11/building-new-podcast-part-3-antiperformativity/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/02/11/building-new-podcast-part-3-antiperformativity/#respondSun, 11 Feb 2018 02:48:26 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=11793This is a response to Joanna's previous letter. Dear Joanna, Thanks for running with my idea! As usual, your arguments are more poetic than mine, though some of what you write is too ephemeral for me to grok - can you expand on the whole 'charming chads chatting' thing? I honestly haven't listened to many [...]

Thanks for running with my idea! As usual, your arguments are more poetic than mine, though some of what you write is too ephemeral for me to grok – can you expand on the whole ‘charming chads chatting’ thing? I honestly haven’t listened to many podcasts, and would like to know what you think we need to avoid.

I do think one of the challenges will be to avoid being overly performative. This podcast will be edited for dead air and flubs, and thus not “total live uncut,” but it should be a genuine reflection of how we normally think and talk. This probably goes without saying, but people act differently when they know they’re being observed, and doubly so when they’re trying to sell something (or in this case, gain and retain an audience). Taken too far, I find this grating, and tend to tune out of any media that overtly plays to the crowd. Do we agree that this is something we need to keep an eye on and avoid as much as possible?

These larger questions of theme and integrity also don’t help us determine our actual content. In the previous letter, I suggested a few outlined area (current events and media), as well as JP-report backs. Are we good on all of those? Do we think we’ll have discrete sections, or just prepped material to talk about in an otherwise free-flowing conversation where I interrupt you a lot to argue with something you said? 1 Is each episode going to be themed in some way, or we will just let it naturally emerge from whatever we did and thought about in the prior month?

I know one thing we’re doing is making some lists and pitching them, because everyone likes lists! You told me about the one you were working on, but I already forgot what it was. Do you want to talk a bit about that process and other appealing things we might do?

As for titles: here’s what we’ve got so far:

“Just Podcast” (we both like this for its self-effacing simplicity and reference to JP, though it goes without saying that it’s singularly undiscoverable in the SEO sense)
“Dork and Stormy,” “Dork Souls,” “Edge of Dorkness,” etc. (This was a running joke during our January visit and of course it’s right up my pun-strewn alley, but it doesn’t tell people anything about what we do and might set up an unreasonable expectation for how many puns we’re gonna have!)“Klingon Sneeze” (from an early Next Generation episode – I like the title in and of itself, and the reference to doing things The Only Way You Know fits, but it’s probably way too inside baseball and will make people think it’s a Trek podcast)
“Nice Bathrobe” (nothing is better than a nice bathrobe!)
“Unnecessary Arguments” (self-explanatory)
“Dear Neighbors, Please Don’t Yell At The TV When I’m Recording a Podcast” (seriously the people in the TV can’t hear you)

That should give you more than enough to respond to! Let me know what you think,

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/02/11/building-new-podcast-part-3-antiperformativity/feed/011793Building a New Podcast, Part 1: Everyone Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/02/04/building-new-podcast-part-1-everyone-else-cant/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/02/04/building-new-podcast-part-1-everyone-else-cant/#respondSun, 04 Feb 2018 05:18:57 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=11775Dear Joanna, For the last month, we've been kicking around the idea of starting a podcast. You suggested fleshing this out in the public sphere, so here's my attempt. If we were doing a proper pitch in an attempt to get funding, we'd have to answer the questions "Why you? Why this? What will make [...]

For the last month, we’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a podcast. You suggested fleshing this out in the public sphere, so here’s my attempt.

If we were doing a proper pitch in an attempt to get funding, we’d have to answer the questions “Why you? Why this? What will make your podcast stand out from the million podcasts already in existence?” Let’s take those in turn.

Why are we doing a podcast?

If we’re being honest, this podcast is for us first and foremost. I want other people to enjoy it, and anyone who creates content for the public should feel the same, but that’s not the impetus for the project; it’s to perpetuate and celebrate our friendship. Keeping a strong distance friendship going is a lot of work, which is presumably why so few people do it; a monthly(?) podcast gives us a scheduled way to keep in touch and a shared project to collaborate on. It also allows us to develop our media production skills, and to find a more stable venue to share our strong opinions (you use Twitter, I use Facebook; these platforms are ephemeral, controlled by publicly held corporations, and not designed for the sort of thoughtful engagement we try to bring to discussions).

That said, I think a good chunk of people will get a kick out of listening to us.

What sets this podcast apart? Why would anyone listen to it?

In my mind, this podcast will not just be a window into our friendship, but a celebration of friendship writ large. American society is weirdly myopic when it comes to human relations; we care a lot about who is having sex with whom, and care about blood relations, but give little weight to friendships (for proof of this, open up People or any of its knockoffs and see how many of the stories are about celebrity friends vs. celebrity lovers). I think we agree that this is a shame, and I hope our banter will inspire an appreciation of just how wonderful a good friend can be.

We’re also pretty thoughtful people, and I think we’ll be able to bring an unorthodox perspective to current events and popular media, particularly in an age of hyper-partisan hot takes.

When we begin, this podcast is going to be listened to by people who already know and like us; that’s just the way it is. And if it never grows beyond that, I’m okay with it. But I think it will be a great adventure and some special souls will enjoy coming along for the ride.

Okay, so what are you actually doing?

A good chunk of the podcast will be dedicated to spending JP and reporting back on experiences. For those just joining us, JP (which stands for Just Points) is a non-monetary betting system that Joanna and I created. We bet JP when we have factual disagreements or want to make predictions about future events. The winner can then spend JP to get the other party to better themselves in some way – watch a movie they otherwise wouldn’t, go out and have a life experience they otherwise wouldn’t get to. Nothing extreme, but enough to give us a positive push outside our comfort zones.

It’s pretty great in theory, but for many years we’ve failed to follow through on the part where we spend it. This podcast will fix that; we’ll have regular sections where we try new things and report back. It should make for some nice variety of conversation!

More than that, we’re still figuring out. We’ll certainly discuss current events and popular (or unpopular!) media, and there will probably be some oddball humor.

What ideas have you? Do you have a different vision, a different pitch? What are your hopes and dreams (and maybe your fears?) Inquiring minds want to know!

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/02/04/building-new-podcast-part-1-everyone-else-cant/feed/011775Short Notes on Every Game I Played in 2017http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/01/28/short-notes-every-game-played-2017/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/01/28/short-notes-every-game-played-2017/#respondSun, 28 Jan 2018 03:51:41 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=1446For the fifth year in a row, I'm writing a few sentences about every game I played this year. Last year I experimented with not restricting myself to a single sentence, and found it resulted in giving games a fairer shake, so this annual series will just be "Short Notes" going forward. Every year, I [...]

]]>For the fifth year in a row, I’m writing a few sentences about every game I played this year. Last year I experimented with not restricting myself to a single sentence, and found it resulted in giving games a fairer shake, so this annual series will just be “Short Notes” going forward. Every year, I promise myself I’ll be responsible and update this as the year goes on, and every year I fail to do so – if I don’t remember much about a game, I suppose that speaks for itself.

As always, an asterisk after the tile means I actually finished it.

The Games of 2017

20,000:1 – A Space Felony*

20,000:1 takes one genre over-represented in video games (sci-fi) and two under-represented (murder mysteries, screwball comedy) and smushes them together in a delightful package, riffing on a particularly ’60s conception of artificial intelligence (one that is devious, but cannot lie in the face of direct evidence). Occasionally suffers from pixel hunting, but the zero-g movement is such a pleasure that I didn’t mind.

In any other year I would have been all over this, but a combination of an aged engine, awkward writing, and opaque systems me drifting to other RPGs. I hope to return it to someday, though I fear it’s full of trap builds.

A highly experimental game about nonverbal communication and/or a parody of depictions of French romance in popular culture, Bientot l’ete is constrained by its budget and asks the players to fill in a lot of gaps; but it’s still a memorable experience, and can be considered a historically important precursor to the still-nascent genre of ‘relationship games.’

While the works of Phillip K. Dick are broadly influential, few fictional works – and even fewer games – have attempted to embody the haunting, paranoid worlds he so consistently created. For better or worse, Californium feels like something Dick could have produced himself, and was one of my more memorable gaming experiences of 2017.

Company of Heroes

Regarded by some as the last great leap forward for the RTS, Company of Heroes holds up remarkably well, continuously providing tense, interesting tactical decisions without becoming overwhelming or descending into micromanagement. The generic “Brothers in Arms” campaign story is embarrassingly amateurish, though.

Crawl*

Crawl is one of an increasingly small number of commercial indie games that manages to be the best game in its niche on account of being the *only* game in its niche. In this case, that niche is “pixel-art dungeon crawler party game,” where three players team up as monsters to take down the hero, with the monster striking the killing blow becoming the new hero. It’s the perfect length and remembers to keep things accessible for a social gaming crowd; I look forward to playing more sessions.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Original Sin 2 is the most celebrated PC RPG in years, so it’s almost shocking that I’m lukewarm on it. It deserves all the praise it gets for its elaborate, systems-driven sandbox of a world, and the relative variety of quests with which it fills that world. But the setting and plot are dull as dishwater; the divisive cornball humor of the first game has been largely removed, but nothing has replaced it, leaving a narrative that doesn’t take itself seriously enough to engage in even rudimentary worldbuilding. The result is a game in which your choices matter in the sense that you can make actual change, but don’t in the sense that they lack weight, because there are few characters or places worth remembering.

Dragon Age II *

A game I enjoyed far more than I expected and more than it deserves, primarily due to the refreshingly small scope; this is a character-driven RPG with purely local stakes, no world-saving required. Even with all the well-publicized cut corners that keep this from being a great RPG, I still preferred it to every Bioware game of the last fifteen years.

Dragon Age: Inquistion*

Like its predecessor, Inquistion greatly exceeded my expectations to become my favorite post-Baldur’s Gate Bioware game. I could write pages, but other projects take precedence; suffice it to say that despite its well-covered foibles (an abundance of Ubisoft-style filler quests, a literal deus ex machina for an antagonist), the game has more spark and joy than any of Bioware’s other recent titles. It consistently steps beyond fan service and slot-machine romance to engage in top-level characterization and surprisingly solid worldbuilding, and frees the player to explore beautiful environments for as much or little time as they please.

Dragon Age: The Last Court

Much like Fallen London, The Last Court is excellent at worldbuilding (much better than the proper Dragon Age games) and dripping with style, but also introduces grinding to interactive fiction, which (for me) kind of ruins the whole affair.

The Dream Machine: Episodes 1 & 2

A relatively straightforward, haunting adventure whose first two episodes are an extended setup for what I hope are bigger and better things. If I sound lukewarm on it, know that it’s puzzles are consistently reasonable, it has the best hand-crafted world since The Neverhood, and the characterization is surprisingly deft given the workmanlike prose. Also, it passes the adventure veteran smell test: it has clever, unique responses to every absurd ‘use item on X’ interaction I could throw at it.

Duck Game

A truly ideal local multiplayer game, Duck Game brought back the experience of playing WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgames for the first time; levels in Duck Game load fast and quick, and you race not just to fight off the other players but to figure out what you need to *do* to win this new level. The mechanics are robust enough to support competitive play once you run out of surprises, but the game is at its best as a series of comically violent “I can’t believe that just happened!” moments.

The Elder Scrolls: Legends

It is genuinely depressing that every single online CCG appears to be based off of Hearthstone, which is in turn based off of Magic – just one of many design paradigms in the CCG space. Where is our Netrunner? Our LOT5R? Our Vampire: The Eternal Struggle?

The Elder Scrolls Online*

A friendly community and a flexible, interesting leveling system are the primary things ESO has going for it; it’s brought down by the same cookie-cutter quest design and repetitive hotbar combat of everything else in the genre, combined with storytelling so banal that it makes Skyrim interesting by comparison.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind

Fan service through and through; as a Morrowind fan, that’s enough to intrigue me, but I foolishly decided to spend 100 hours on the base game before hitting the expansion, meaning I was sick and tired of all its systems by the time I got to the content I really wanted.

Faeria

Whatever polish or small innovations Faeria brings to the digital-CCG genre – and it has both – is overwhelmed by its shocking decision to be even stingier than Hearthstone. If I’m gonna spend a fortune on cards, I’ll do it on ones that I’m allowed to sell or trade.

Far Cry: Blood Dragon

I think this is one of those ‘you had to be there’ games – Far Cry 3‘s combat and systems haven’t aged well, and the hyper-ironic, stereotypical ’80s humor has been enormously overdone by this point.

The Flame in the Flood

Evokes a distinct, Southern playspace that is criminally underexplored in games; but the actual gameplay is both repetitive and punishing, to the point where I didn’t sink enough time into this to ever have a good run.

Frog Fractions 2

Despite being a backer and a big fan of the original, I bounced off this hard; it’s certainly clever, but it embraces its retro stylings too much; to find the hidden gems and humor, the player has to navigate an early ’80s style action-RPG, replete with that genre’s terrible signposting. I will probably like it better if I just use a walkthrough.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Sadly overlooked, Ghost Trick is one of the few good graphic adventures I’ve found on portable consoles (in this case, the Nintendo DS). The game’s a series of elaborate setpiece puzzles, in which the player (as an incorporeal poltergeist) must possess and activate various inanimate objects to set off Rube Goldberg-esque chain reactions and stop the murder. Surprisingly accomplished animation and a pleasant sense of humor keep me coming back (and I will finish this one, as I play it off and on while traveling).

Glittermitten Grove

I actually played this more than the more famous game (Frog Fractions 2) it contains; it combines clicker/idle games with builder games in a pretty chill and pleasing manner.

Grow Home*

An infinitely charming, glorified tech demo; it’s a little shallow, but smart enough to end before it exhausts the interests of its systems. The emphasis on jetpacking all around a green landscape pleasantly reminded me of puttering around in Tribes 2.

Headlander*

More a triumph of art design than anything; the ’60s psychedelic aesthetic is fleshed out rather than merely referenced and consistently delightful, but it’s otherwise a fairly straightforward Metroidvania with a mite too much repetition and retreading, even by the standards of that genre. Still, it’s consistently pleasant enough to warrant finishing.

Hitman GO

Essentially a slider-puzzle game/order-of-operations game, I could see this being a lot of fun on a tablet or a plane ride; on a desktop PC, there are just too many other, more interesting puzzle games.

Holy Potatoes: A Weapon Shop?!

It says a lot about me that I continued playing a bit past the point of boredom just to see the next terrible pun the game came up with. The game itself falls in a sort of uncanny valley where it demands too much micromanage to achieve the relaxing compulsiveness of clicker games, and yet isn’t involved enough to succeed as a management or strategy game.

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms

The most boring fantasy setting meets the most boring game genre! Alec Meer notes that Idle Champions is an “oddly active idle game,” as it requires constant micro-management. This leaves it in a sort of uncanny valley, since it’s too passive to reward the babysitting it requires (and if that description sounds remarkably like the one for Holy Potatoes, well, they have the exact same problem). Also, it uses the typical exploitative micro transactions to fund the endeavor.

Jezzball

I’ve come to appreciate just how consistently interesting the best of the Microsoft Entertainment Games were. Jezzball is a simple arcade game, and yet there’s nothing else like it save it’s obvious inspiration (1981’s Qix).

Kingdom

At first glance, I love everything about Kingdom; the glorious pixel art, the ground-level view of kingdom building, the slow expansion of territory, the mystery of its many systems. Learning that the entire thing was a massive trial-and-error puzzle, dooming the player to constant restarts until they achieve a combination of systems mastery and event memorization, was the biggest gaming letdown of my year.

Life is Strange*

Life is Strange feels like a high-quality television show from the ‘1990s; it has the serial plotting and narrative drive, but knows how to make satisfying, self-contained episodes in way that is increasingly rare in modern television. It’s narrative is ambitious and a little ramshackle; pretty much everyone is going to have quibbles over the story’s many twists and turns, and I’m no exception, but I thoroughly enjoyed every moment with it. It also has consistently wonderful iconography.

The Little Acre*

This short, traditional point-and-click adventure feels like a work of animation first and a game second; the straightforward puzzles keep the pace moving, but the game simply doesn’t have enough time to develop its story or characters during its brief running time, and the climax feels wholly unearned. Yet the artwork and the movement of the characters really is so consistently lovely that I’d still recommend it to people who place a lot of weight on those elements.

The Long Journey Home

Something of a tribute to Star Control II, The Long Journey Home features genuinely lovely writing from Richard Cobbett and what is, on paper,a nice mix of gameplay systems; but for me, the core loop wasn’t fun, and it felt like stumbling from failure to failure, with little helpful feedback provided to help me figure out what I did wrong. With more time, I’d either learn to appreciate its variety and offbeat systems or grow to truly hate the Lunar Lander style puzzles, but there are Too Many Games.

Mainlining*

Mainlining is one of the few games to follow in the footsteps of Uplink, and occupies a sweet spot between its predecessors’ “hacking-as-puzzle” focus and a traditional graphic adventure. It looks great and has a charmingly offbeat sense of humor, though a few leaps of logic undermine both the central puzzles and the plot, and it’s ultimately a more linear affair than it markets itself as. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for something different from point-and-click games.

Mario Party10

I played this all of one time in the course of hosting a weekly library program, so I am in no way qualified to evaluate it, but I will state the obvious: Mario Party with four people is ten times as fun as the hell that is two player Mario Party.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Every once in a while, I’ll play a game whose reputation precedes it, and find that the generic take on the game is entirely accurate. Shadow of Mordor is one such title: it features more interesting and entertaining enemy AI than any game in the last decade, and playing with that system is a lot of fun, though it’s ultimately wrapped up in a game design and combat system that is almost shockingly derivative of Assassin’s Creed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it’s probably the best implementation not made by Ubisoft themselves – but having made the poor life choice to play six Assassin’s Creed games to completion in the last decade, I am currently unable to bring myself to see this to its conclusion.

Mini Metro

Subway maps of the London Underground have been a font of artistic inspiration for pretty much every other medium, so why not video games? The result is a visually striking puzzler that’s not nearly as simple as it first appears, though I kept stumbling over some unintuitive controls for changing subway routes. Generally open-ended, this occupies a similar experiential space as Hexcells and other minimalist puzzlers: great games to play before bed, while listening to music or a podcast.

Mobius Final Fantasy

Impressively deep systems for a free to play mobile game, but it’s grindy even by the standards of JRPGs, and features what may be the worst narrative to ever have the Final Fantasy name attached to it. The story combines groan-inducing fan service with painfully self-aware jokes about the enormous amount of padding in its central questline.

Monster Slayers*

I’ve enjoyed this low-budget roguelike more than almost all of its more accomplished peers; it perfectly captures the pleasure of making a perfect chain in a deck-building game, and then does it over and over again. Feels sort of like a compulsive free-to-play game with all the scumminess taken out (since there are no microtransactions).

Night in the Woods*

Probably my favorite game of 2018, Night in the Woods deserves a full write-up; for now I’ll say that the game’s most notable feature is the way it carries itself, the total confidence in its unorthodox choice of characters and narrative structure, and the painfully honest representation of young adults desperately searching for meaning and causing themselves a lot of harm in the process. This pathos comfortably sits aside conversations that had me actually laughing out loud (something I rarely do with written comedy!).

Northmark: Hour of theWolf*

There’s a strange lack of single-player CCG-style card games, perhaps because the potential money in multiplayer CCGs is so high that nobody bothers. Northmark is an amateurish concoction of middling card combat and hit-and-miss self-parodic humor, but it’s one of the few games of its genre we got, and I can honestly say I enjoyed most of my time with it and would happily pay for a sequel.

Ohklos

Ohklos brought back fond childhood memories of Cannon Fodder and Pikmin, and it’s irreverent-yet-detailed approach to Greek mythology manages to make a tired setting fun again. The controls are too chaotic and the rewards too random to justify the game’s difficulty, though; it really needs an Easy mode.

Overcooked

I played the first three levels at my birthday party, and its every bit the chaotic couch party delight I’d been told. I now have a strong desire to start a regular Overcooked campaign group; the only reason I’m not acting on this is the fact that I’m involved in three separate tabletop campaigns plus a fortnightly open games night. I can put it off with the confident that it will age gracefully.

Pathfinder Adventures (Steamversion)*

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is one of my all time favorite tabletop games, a clever adaptation of pen-and-paper dungeon crawling to a card-and-dice system; it perfectly captures the dopamine rushes of new loot and treasure while having real strategic complexity and a number of clever puzzles. Obsidian’s adaptation is tremendously faithful, so it’s good on that count, though at times I thought it was almost too faithful; this is entirely unchanged from the physical game, and there are at least some card and mechanic refinements that could have been made in the adaptation to digital. Also, it really is more fun with friends, but anyone who enjoys solitaire gaming will get a kick out of this.

Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations* (really should be 2016 but I missed it)

At a certain point I had to accept the Phoenix Wright series’ staunch refusal to meaningfully change or adapt from game to game; having done so, I was rewarded with what is probably the tightest, most confident game in the series, that makes good use of its now-sizeable cast of recurring characters, including the rare fan service that actually feels earned. A part of me feels that I’ve played more than enough Phoenix Wright for a lifetime; another part of me wants to leap into the next game right now.

Please, Don’t Touch Anything

Essentially a “click and see what happens” software toy, Please, Don’t Touch Anything is an amusing diversion, though I think it orients itself too far towards “unlock all the permutations/achievements” when a freeform exploration would be more wondrous.

Pony Island

Takes a clever conceit (what if Satan was a bad game designer who forced unwitting souls to play his shovelware?) and explores it thoroughly, but in order to drill the concept home the player has to play a lot of one-life-only endless runner stages; your mileage will definitely vary, and despite respecting it I never quite finished because there are more rewarding meta-video-game explorations to be had elsewhere.

Prey (2017)*

Prey (2017) was the biggest surprise of the year for me; a theoretical reboot of a middling game, infamously ripped from its previous developer by a horrid publisher, and marketed as a generic combination of Alien and System Shock, this wasn’t even on my radar at the beginning of the year. I should have known better; developer Arkane has spent nearly twenty years iterating on the immersive sims of Looking Glass Studios, and I suspect Prey will be considered the pinnacle of the genre for years to come. It gives players the enormous playspace and variety of tools of the best immersive sims of yore, updates it with fluid movement and combat, and seems to have an ethos of pushing everything one step beyond what any reasonable player would consider good enough. It has an enormous amount of faith in the player’s capability to figure things out and carve their own best path, and thus creates a joy of discovery lacking in other open world games that highlight every nook and cranny with glowing signposts. The general consensus is that the traditional immersive sim is no longer commercially viable, and Prey may be the last one for the foreseeable future; but if that’s so, it’s a hell of a high note to end on.

RidiculousFishing*

At the 2013 Game Developer’s Conference, an indie dev at the hotel I was staying at showed me Ridiculous Fishing; when I finally got a smartphone in December 2016, it was the first game I bought. The core loop is great by the standards of any platform, and in a just world people would not think twice about dropping $3 on a game of this quality.

Sacramento*

In a strange twist of fate, Sacramento was released a mere two days after I moved into my new apartment in Sacramento, California, a city I had never been to save for the initial housing search. I’d like to draw some deep connection between the two, but the appeal of Sacramento (the game) was largely lost on me; it’s a lovely-looking watercolor space to walk around with, but is threadbare even by the standards of ‘walking simulators,’ and the only thing it has in common with its namesake (that I can tell) is the landscape, which threads a railroad track through swampy waters reminiscent of the estuaries of the nearby river delta. Then again, I didn’t really appreciate Sacramento (the city) either, and am just beginning to grow fond of it.

Something Something Soup Something

A victim of my failure to write these descriptions in a timely manner, all I can tell you is that the wonderfully-titled Something Something Soup Something is an interesting linguistics experiment and conversation piece masquerading as a game; if you have any friends with an interest in language or epistemology, then this is well worth the few minutes it will take to play through.

Spaceplan*

Like A Dark Room, Spaceplan is an experiment in creating a narrative-driven idle game, though this aims for humor rather than foreboding; it’s a small thing, but it’s good on its own terms. The commercial “expanded remake” of the browser original is also unusual in being a clicker game with no microtransactions; in an age populated by exploitative, money-grubbing clicker games like Adventure Capitalist, it’s both pleasant and depressing to look at the path not taken.

Star Wars: Battlefront

I think most critics – myself included – don’t give enough weight to their own expectations when explaining why they did (or didn’t) like a game. Had I been hyped for Battlefront on its original 2015 release and dropped $60 on it, I no doubt would have been disappointed; but after buying it on a whim for $5, with all expansions included, I unexpectedly found myself really enjoying it. I ended up logging more hours than I have in any online shooter since Planetside 2, and while the lovingly-rendered Star Wars battlescapes are certainly part of it, the bigger draw was Battlefront‘s minimalism; this is a casual, accessible shooter that strips out most of the gruff of its competitors and has a quite generous unlock system that doesn’t get in the way.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (Singleplayer)*

There was a time when people thought Disney would be precious with Star Wars, would seek to control every major instance of it for quality and being on-brand. This has proven wildly incorrect; the single player campaign for Star Wars: Battlefront II is astonishingly bad, simultaneously failing to display even basic narrative logic and character motivations while blowing holes in any sensible canon. After you get through the moderately promising opening, it’s like watching a slow motion train wreck that just gets worse and worse. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of the last time I played a game that marketed itself primarily on its narrative (“An Untold Star Wars Story”) and yet seemed to care so little about it. The game itself is a shooting gallery full of brain-dead AI; the only saving grace is the dumb fun of the starfighter battles, which are shallow but lovely arcade comfort food that let you forget about the rest of the game for up to ten minutes at a time.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (Multiplayer)

Battlefront 2 amps up the spectacle, but also amps up the chaos; the star mode (Galactic Battlegrounds) is good for a lark, but inevitably made me feel like I was being pulled along by larger events rather than competing in any real sense. The standout is Starfighter Assault, which has arcade-space-combat mechanics straight out of Crimson Skies, and I really wish a more fleshed out version could be the basis for a singleplayer game. Alas, the entire affair is undercut by a terrible progression system that does basically everything wrong; it doesn’t let the player choose how to progress, and the actual unlocks are largely dull, number-increasing buffs that do nothing but given veteran players an even bigger advantage than they already have.

Steamworld Heist*

If both this and its predecessor, Steamworld Dig, are a little too slight for me to truly love, they’re also far too charming and mechanically solid to dismiss as fluff; there’s a lot to be said for a procedurally-generated XCOM-lite, and the aiming mechanic is deep enough that it never stops generating dramatic, hold-your-breath moments (see this excellent Alex Wiltshire writeup for more on that).

Stardew Valley*

What can I say? Stardew Valley is exactly as good as you’ve heard; not only does it bring the Harvest Moon genre to the PC after a decades-long drought, but it surpasses all of its forbears with more varied activities, less micromanagement, and surprisingly strong writing. It’s a wonder that it’s the work of one developer, to the point where it’s tempting to give it a free pass on the few things it doesn’t improve (namely the method for gaining favor, which is ye olde ‘discover people’s likes through trial and error and make a big mental spreadsheet’ system, which has always been my least favorite part of relationship-building games and is in full force here). Compulsively playable and a great gateway game.

Suikoden: Tierkreis*

Suikoden: Tierkreis is cursed by some dodgy voice acting and a plot that (like so many JRPG stories) gets increasingly banal as it approaches its conclusion. And yet I finished it and enjoyed almost my entire time with it, which means a lot given my low tolerance for random battles and JRPG tropes. At the end of the day, the massive casts of the Suikoden games force them to have both a truly epic scope, character-driven stories, and genuine variety to combat and party builds, a combination hard to find outside the better Final Fantasy titles. There’s nothing quite like it, and it’s a series I’ll miss.

Tales from the Borderlands*

It would be a little unfair to call Tales from the Borderlands “a very good TV show trapped inside a video game,” but it’s not far off the mark; the game is made by the script and performance, and the few moments of interactive gold are buried in a mound of mediocre QTEs, meaningless choices, and variations of “press A to continue.” Yet it’s a solid comedy with remarkably satisfying character development and consistently stellar opening credit sequences.

Tiger Team*

Brendon Chung’s contribution to the delightful Epistle 3 Jam shows us what Half Life 3 would be like if it was made by one person with no budget; this is a surprisingly amusing prospect, and there’s a part of me that is happy the actual Half-Life 3 was never released so that we could enjoy the fruits of fan imaginations.

Torment: Tides ofNumenera*

Diehard fans of Planescape: Torment spewed vitriol at Tides of Numenera for being too different to its spiritual predecessor (by virtue of a different setting, different systems, and admittedly some issues with pacing and creating memorable characters); the broader audience of RPG fans slammed it for having an inordinate focus on textual descriptions and dialog in place of combat and monkeying around with RPG systems (in other words, being just like Planescape: Torment). This alone should tell you that for whatever flaws the game has, it’s genuinely distinct, not least because of its almost singular focus on elaborately, richly-textured worldbuilding. It’s not as memorable, or as emotionally affecting, as Planescape: Torment, but it’s an arguably more mature title.

Tracks (free version)

The minimalist, sandbox prototype was entertaining on its own; it perfectly models the joy of building classic wooden train tracks (think Brio) and spreading them throughout your bedroom. I look forward to the developer’s attempts to flesh it out into a full game.

Virginia*

I realized about 30 minutes into Virginia that it was singularly inspired by Brendon Chung’s 30 Flights of Loving; and while it never reaches that game’s heights, it’s still a provocative, beautiful short story that makes a strong case for greater use of film-style editing in interactive narrative.

XCOM 2*

I have a strange relationship with turn-based strategy games; I thoroughly enjoy the best ones while playing them, but they don’t stick with me in the way other genre bests do. I suspect it’s a combination of the player acting at a remove and the disinterest in conventional storytelling. Anyway, XCOM 2 is a finally-wrought game, introducing many intelligent and substantive changes to its predecessor, even if it dilutes the purity a bit. The advantage of not being a solely iterative sequel is that it doesn’t replace the original, but stands alongside it, just as XCOM: Enemy Unknown could not truly replace the original X-COM: UFO Defense.

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2018/01/28/short-notes-every-game-played-2017/feed/01446Game Club: 2064 – Read Only Memorieshttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/09/10/game-club-2064-read-memories/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/09/10/game-club-2064-read-memories/#respondSun, 10 Sep 2017 00:58:41 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=11634Welcome to Game Club, where Joanna Price and myself exchange letters about a game we've jointly played. This week, we're discussing 2064: Read Only Memories, the remastered version of Read Only Memories from developer Midboss. All the letters are collected here for your perusal, as well as some of the many screenshots I took. As [...]

]]>Welcome to Game Club, where Joanna Price and myself exchange letters about a game we’ve jointly played. This week, we’re discussing 2064: Read Only Memories, the remastered version of Read Only Memories from developer Midboss. All the letters are collected here for your perusal, as well as some of the many screenshots I took. As usual, the letters are chock-full of spoilers.

(Also, I’m using alt text in the images).

Letter 1

Hey Joanna,

I have a lot of thoughts about this month’s game, Read Only Memories. For those who haven’t played it, Read Only Memories is a Kickstarted graphic adventure game closely modeled after Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher (specifically the 1994 Sega CD release, as opposed to the original 1988 PC-88/MSX-2 release).Which is to say: it’s a very Japanese idea of a graphic adventure, with an interface designed for a keyboard/console controller rather than a mouse, and with a disproportionate amount of time taken up by talking heads (a sort of precursor to what would eventually become the visual novel genre). The action takes place in Neo San Francisco in 2064, with every cyberpunk trope you can think of making an appearance and driving the plot (more on that later). It also shares Snatcher’s easy, logical puzzles and general avoidance of fail states. 1 The developers have gone as far as to give the game the same graphical fidelity as Snatcher (actually, a bit worse!) which is probably a budget consideration as much as an aesthetic choice. The game was recently re-released as 2064: Read Only Memories, which adds voice-acting and a new epilogue.

In theory, I’m that target audience for this game. I’ve played and enjoyed Snatcher2, I like pixel art, I like cyberpunk, and I am particularly forgiving of small-budget indie games when the developer’s earnest enthusiasm shines through (as it very much does here). And yet while playing Read Only Memories, I had trouble getting into the immersive space, and alternated between boredom and eye-rolling.

The primary, and most obvious, issue with Read Only Memories is that it’s so indistinct. A lot of games we’ve covered for game club put a disproportionate focus on setting, plot, or character; ROM focuses on all three equally, and they’re all overly familiar. The setting is the most generic, pseudo-futuristic cyberpunk city you can imagine; the only thing that sets it apart is its intentional rooting in San Francisco (where the chief developer lives), and even that is largely window dressing and doesn’t really address any situations unique to San Fran. It occurred to me over the course of the game that somehow, every starving artist and full-time hacktivist managed to afford rent in SF, despite the fact that the little info we’re given tells us that SF has turned into a corporate state where all public services have been privatized.

I’ll admit that this is a nitpick; the problem is that every single element of the game is nitpickable. Characters are decently written and sometimes even charming, but all suffer from being fairly obvious. The plot unravels really slowly, and reveals itself to be third-grade Neuromancer knockoff when it gets to the reveal. The big conspiracy (SPOILER WARNING) is that a distributed AI will monitor people’s use of the future-internet and change what they see based on their perceived preferences and/or what those in power want them to see. This isn’t cyberpunk; this is real-life 2017. It’s called big data, and love it or hate it it isn’t exactly a hidden conspiracy.

This situation is made even worse by over-obvious referencing. The anti-hybrid group is called Human Revolution. The update that gives all ROMs sapience is called Wintermute. There’s a guy named Leon Dekker who (UNSURPRISING SPOILER) isn’t human. It’s artless and blew whatever immersion I had every time one popped up.

The game does exactly one interesting thing with its world-building, and that has more to do with its crowdfunding origins. This wasn’t Kickstarted by an establishment developer, but rather a group of conference-runners, who created and hosted GaymerX, the first large-scale gay gaming convention. It was thus inevitable that it would be pitched to the GaymerX crowd as a game that would be unusually inclusive of varying gender and sexual identities. Its novel way of doing this was imagining a future in which oppression along these lines had totally disappeared.

It works well. Apart from being pleasant escapism, it can dodge heternormativity by not making a character’s gender or sexual orientation their defining status, merely a sidenote. Likewise, the characters don’t all have to be written as oppressed. There are a million ways they could have been tokenistic, or agenda-ed at the expense of fleshing out characters, and it deftly avoids all of the obvious pitfalls. It’s a pleasure…until it undermines the entire premise by focusing a lot of its runtime on the oppression of ‘hybrids,’ humans who have modified themselves with animal DNA.

Basically: it goes out of its way to use a framework other than identity politics to look at the lived existences of characters with real-life identities, than invents a fictional identity and brings the framework right back. It digs itself a deeper hole by having the anti-hybrid group called the Human Revolution, which instantly recalls Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a game that did a remarkable job of fleshing out the arguments on both sides of the debate and making them both compelling. Here, the anti-hybrid people are portrayed as a mix of malicious bigots and ignorant dolts.

I have a lot more criticisms in this vein, but they all basically boil down to the same thing: an earnest, competent execution unwilling or (more likely) unable to push beyond the obvious. There is something to be said for comfort food, and at its best this is indeed good comfort food; one of its hidden charms is writing an enormous amount of verb-noun interactions of the sort graphic adventure games had, and I enjoyed using my carton of spoiled milk on every character and piece of scenery in the entire game and getting a unique, often punny response. But then I find myself in another piece of uninteresting exposition, clicking through dialog sentence by sentence, and my warmth turns to exasperation.

That’s more than enough for the first letter. Let me know how it went for you!

Thanks,

Dylan

Letter 2

Hey Dylan,

I think I have a lot of the same complaints, but how I think of it is that it’s just too predictable. I don’t know how possible it is to write a story in which an AI does something unexpected anymore. I believe that the “every possible ending” solution is a really terrible way of approaching the “it’s all been done before” thing, like it feels like story infidelity. The game has several endings, and players who have finished one or two of the endings but don’t want to play through the rest of them, can see a table of them here.

My problem with the story is thus twofold: in the first place, as you note when you say it is “indistinct,” I found myself not super enthralled, and often able to predict the story. You call this a nitpick, but I would argue that it’s a big problem. In a narrative heavy game, not committing to an interesting narrative is a problem, and if you’re retelling an old story — which is wonderful thing to do, don’t get me wrong — it’s important to do it in a way that remains relevant and immediate to the player. Secondly, to my mind, instead of committing to the narrative (what I am calling “story fidelity”), this game simply offers all the endings. I think “an ending for everybody” is a poor way to write a story, and a bad reason for branching narrative in a game. It struck me as a lazy solution to an admittedly tough challenge — writing a great game that is so story focused. I mention the toughness to explain that I am not sitting here fuming at the writers or developers, I’m just noting that the game didn’t make the grade for me. I don’t believe that it is right to “No Man’s Sky” a developer, if I don’t like a game, that doesn’t mean that the devs are terrible or that they’re required to do anything about it.

I’m curious why you think this way of not using identity politics is particularly interesting, given that games really only became extremely political not that long ago, as far as I can tell. The older story games don’t feature political views very heavily even when they express characters or groups with political views. But perhaps that differentiates indie, comparatively low-budget games from games with either Big Name Devs or from Big Name Companies. Perhaps one of the ways indie gaming has gotten a foothold and an audience is with political agenda. At any rate, I didn’t find the lack of identity politics all that refreshing because as you rightly pointed out, the framework is still there.

I actually loved the voice of the AI Turing, which made up sometimes for the bleh dialog. One thing that drives me bonkers is when the player is kept from important information because the character who gives it just won’t get around to saying it before you go through X number of dialog trees which tease it. The other highlight for me was the number of interactable objects, and the narrative that went along with them. Normally I’m not click happy, especially if I’m really into the story. But I was kind of bored with the story, so I spent some time clicking around and I enjoyed that.

I think for me, my time would have been better spent on a different game. I liked J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars mechanically more, and it had a similar AI vs human trope and similarly developed (or undeveloped) characters. [N.B. the actual plotline of the J.U.L.I.A. is not similar, but they have questions, themes and a strong narrative focus in common] That said, this might well be a good game for people who don’t have a ton of experience in narrative gaming. Like the “Settlers of Catan” of story games. Players who have spent even a a little time with euro games move quickly past Settlers. But Settlers is an excellent introduction to euro gaming for people who have played mainly American family and party games, in that it presents many of the common mechanics about as generically as possible — when playing future games, various mechanics will be familiar. I felt this way of about Read Only Memories, I thought it presented a lot of common features of story based indie games — dialog heavy, developed plots, lots of clickable area, puzzles, etc — without doing anything particularly original or new. If it were the first of this general type of game I had played, I’d probably have had a much better experience. But for someone with that experience already, J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars has similar narrative themes, and meets most of the same player interests and needs, while having better mechanics and more draw, in my opinion.

Thanks,

Joanna

Letter 3

Hey Joanna,

To take things in order: while I agree with you that the game is too predictable, I actually had no problem with the multiple endings – and was only tangentially aware they existed, since I only played the game through once. Multiple endings have been around for as long as video games have, because in a game that responds to play choice, it is only natural that the conclusion of the game changes based upon those choices. I agree with you that they’re a weird fit for Read Only Memories, because by and large this is a linear game without substantive or difficult choices, but in the abstract lots of games have successfully implemented multiple endings, and I don’t think that implies a lack of commitment. 3 But of course I can only speak to the ending I got. Did you play the game multiple times? Did you ‘save and reload’ to see what would happen with different endings? What drove you to do these things, and did it negatively impact the weight of your original ending? Have you played other games that you thought handled multiple endings better (for me, Cyanides’ Game of Thrones comes to mind as a game that let me choose the perfect ending to the aspects of the story I was focusing on)?

But overall, I think we’re on the same page: the surest way to genericism is to try to be all things to all people, and Read Only Memories seems unwilling to alienate any potential audience by being in any way distinct. To answer your question about how it handles the politics, it is true that games have historically been ‘apolitical’ – but they have done so by basically only showing and focusing on certain segments of the population (white men who use violence to solve problems) instead of looking at humanity more broadly. This was not a commentary or even self-aware, just a combination of the developers unconsciously recreating their own normal, and publishers consciously ‘playing to the [existing] market.’ So it’s unusual and unexpected when a game founded on the promise that it will do the *exact opposite* attempts to use the same framework (of characterizing its world and characters as unremarkable and normal, rather than loudly declaring itself more diverse). As someone who plays a lot of indie games, I can promise you this is the not the norm. But, as I mentioned and you so eloquently characterized, it uses a different lens for the exact same framework, so it’s only interesting on the surface; and in a sense it’s even worse, because that framework is intentionally unexamined by virtue of being diegetically unremarkable. If nothing else, there’s a lesson here: applying the thoughtlessness of the majority to minorities may be subversive, but it’s still thoughtless.

I definitely came around to Turing over time, and agree that ultimately the voice made an unremarkable character memorable, and is a good example of how distinct performances can really lift a modest script. As for your concern about dialog trees – it didn’t really bother me that much because I’m the kind of person who wants to follow every dialog tangent anyway, but in general it is always annoying when any work acts as if the player is dumb, or when the player character/narrator lags behind the player/reader in what they perceive.

I appreciate that you are trying to give the game an out as a ‘starter game,’ but ultimately I think that there are simply better-suited games (as you yourself note). The Settlers of Catan4 may be incredibly vanilla, but it’s some of the world’s best vanilla, with a simple-yet-deep design refined and polished through playtesting. Read Only Memories is mediocre vanilla, and the world is so awash in good-not-great, straightforward point-and-click adventures that I’m not really sure why anyone would start with this one unless it was really important for them that the game featured a lot of queer characters.

Incidentally – if you’re looking for a game that goes above and beyond in exploring the questions of AI, I’d recommend The Talos Principle. This puzzler (penned by Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes) brings tons of relevant philosophical and scientific writing to the fore and tries to go about as deep as a game can go without being completely inaccessible to a lay audience. It definitely doesn’t skate on the inherent appeal of big philosophical questions.

Finally – I know we’re putting this letter series on ice for now, and if we ever do any future games writing it will probably be in a different format. I wanted to say what a pleasure it’s been to hear your insights on these interesting games. There’s something wonderful and comforting about sharing the solitary experience of playing single-player games, and I look forward to whatever we do in the future.

Best,

Dylan

Letter 4

Hey Dylan,
I think you’re right that many games implement multiple endings successfully. The linearity of this plot line does not inherently mean there is a strong commitment to the story, but Read Only Memories doesn’t have a whole ton else going for it– it’s not the excellent graphics or amazing combat, the open world or the fantastic multiplayer. It’s a story driven game. From that perspective, given that the plot doesn’t branch a whole lot, it seems like the designers either had to commit to the story or make a less good game. For me, the six main endings were disappointing because they felt like a last minute decision to not commit. There are a few “secret endings” that I read about later, and those are a horse of a different color for me. The difference is that with the original six endings, it was taking away from the central thrust, but secret endings add another layer of interaction as opposed to diluting the story. In particular, due to the philosophical nature of this story, it seems to me that what I call “narrative fidelity” is even more important. The game is asking interesting questions but it feels a little bit like wandering around when it doesn’t “bring the player home,” I end up sort of left with the feeling that I never finished engaging with the story. The first version I played, Turing hates me at the end of the game, and I had a previous save that I called up and did things differently. The other endings I just read about.

It’s just a really strange story to go the generic route with. It’s not like you have a dwarf, an elf, a bard and a warrior mage trying to save some fantasy land here, I didn’t even know you could be generic about the question of sentient computing. So it’s kind of intriguing in a way, and kind of hilarious, this weird commitment to tepid storytelling. Also the use of Turing was interesting, because the very first thing the player does upon encountering Turing is distinguish the character as AI — but the Turing test is not to create an AI that is as intelligent and sentient as people, but to create one that is indistinguishable from people. This haphazard philosophy thing is so weird, I find it kind of amusing. It may be the most permissible in terms of identity exactly because it is so accommodating. It does make me wonder if they were actively trying to avoid a fight.

I own the The Talos Principle but I’ve never played it. I think J.U.L.I.A. and Read Only Memories have a similar lightness to them, they ask about the same amount of work from the player, address many of the same themes, and J.U.L.I.A. is just a better game. Which is to say: I do think they’re comparable. I donno about The Talos Principle, but I’ll take your word for it!

This completes Games Club for now, I believe. But I look forward to reading your future writing, nonetheless. Thanks for writing with me!

Notes:

This was radical in the context of American adventure games in 1994 – it was only a few years earlier that The Secret of Monkey Island had invented the death-free adventure, but even that still had plenty of difficult, adventure-game-logic puzzles. Of course, in 2017, Read Only Memories is just doing what everyone else is doing ↩

Though it’s Kojima’s Japan-only follow-up, Policenauts (1994), that is near and dear to my heart. ↩

One of my pet peeves in video games is a particular bad way of implementing multiple endings; making the default, achievable ending a ‘bad ending’ that is intentionally unsatisfying, and forcing the player to replay the game and jump through various hoops in order to get a positive ending or (worse) and ending that actually makes sense. For whatever reason, this has traditionally only been done with Japanese games (perhaps because this is perceived as increasing the ‘value’ of the game). But thankfully, Read Only Memories doesn’t do this. ↩

Since renamed ‘Catan’ by the company who publishes it, in order to create a Brand it can slap every which way – nevertheless that it makes the game sound like it’s about geography rather than the settlers! ↩

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/09/10/game-club-2064-read-memories/feed/011634Game Club: Night in the Woods - An Open Letter Serieshttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/05/20/game-club-night-woods/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/05/20/game-club-night-woods/#respondSat, 20 May 2017 19:00:41 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=1439Welcome to Game Club, where Joanna Price and myself exchange letters about a game we've jointly played. This week, we're discussing Night in the Woods, the full-length follow-up to Longest Night and Lost Constellation. All the letters are collected here for your perusal, as well as some of the many screenshots I took. Letter 1 [...]

Letter 1

Hey Dylan,
I quite enjoyed Night in the Woods, a game which used platformer, puzzle and point-and-click adventure mechanics, as well as a gorgeous aesthetic to tell the story of a teenager named Mae with a murky past coming home after she drops out of college.

Her parents, who clearly love her, seem to take a hands off approach as she navigates readjusting to small town life for much of the beginning of the game. But it is revealed that they are very involved in helping her through bouts of mental instability and aggression, working hard to get her into college. Given all of this, there is a real question about the likability of the main character which can get in the way of playing for a lot of people. That is, I think often the immersion breaks when a person feels alienated from the character he or she is supposed to be playing.

That said, the way Mae expresses the frustration of stagnation, and the way the supernatural elements of the story interact with the theme of the abandonment of small town America are moving. For me, despite Mae’s often frustrating tendencies, it was hard not to feel for her and the hand she had been dealt. I think one thing this game does quite well is challenge our notion of what empowerment is and how it works. More specifically, outside of the troubles the small mining town she lives in are facing, the constraints that her own perspective enforces on her experience affects the amount of agency she has. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a largely unexplored truth about the relationship between perception and power that works exactly as objectively (not more or less) than social constructs that are external to us, but include us, do.

I think the ending was a little heavy-handed, but I don’t actually mind that element — I think it’s fair to expect a large gaming audience to be diverse enough to include people whose skills sets lie in other places besides detecting literary themes. As librarians, we obviously are proponents of accessibility and I think the end of the game in some ways makes certain ideas that are thematic throughout the game accessible.

I’m curious to know what you thought about the way the social relationships in the game develop, and whether you ended up sympathizing with Mae or resenting her, or anything in between.

Letter 2

Hey Joanna,

I also greatly enjoyed Night in the Woods. You mention the ways narratives, and the way they’re told, can break our immersive space. This is a very common problem for me in video games, largely because of the way they’re made, with the mechanics and levels set first and then writers told to magically make it all make sense. This leads to a lot of situations where games exist in opposition to themselves (ludonarrative dissonance as well as more traditional nonsense). 1

In contrast, Night in the Woods is a game that feels organic, that is chock full of content and characters but doesn’t have a single scene that feels out-of-place. I’d guess that the world, stories and characters were fleshed out by the team in an iterative fashion, riffing on itself over the years of development and building an increasingly layered world.

The world, as you note, has two centers: protagonist Mae Borowski, and Possum Springs (her hometown). It’s pretty typical for a setting to be the best-developed aspect of a game’s narrative (it’s something the medium excels at), but much less common to have such a distinct protagonist. To answer your question: at no point did I feel put out by Mae’s antics or otherwise feel alienated, and I’d like to talk about why she (and all the other characters) work so well for me.

As some general background: you know that my relationship to empathy is different from most people’s. One way I’ve seen this manifest is that, with a few rare exceptions (GABRIELLE!), my objections to fictional characters is exclusively formal; I dislike characters when they are poorly written, or lazy stereotypes, etc. But I embrace any character that is fleshed-out and honest, even if they have issues – because ALL people have issues, those issues make them human, and the screen presents a certain distance that allows me to feel compassion rather than be annoyed. Even if that weren’t the case in general, I’d still feel for and root for Mae; she is an earnest, honest, sincere character, and I find that very endearing. Plus, insofar as she’s a screw-up and causes problems for those around here, this is primarily a result of A. mental health issues, and B. being a teenager. As someone who was once a teenager with mental health issues, empathizing isn’t that hard. I only see people being alienated if they have forgotten what it is like to be young, to be confronted for the first time with all the existential issues of “what is my place in the world?” and “where do I go from here?” combined with – as your yourself say – limited experience resulted in a narrow perspective that constrains your options. But I don’t want readers to think that Mae is just a sad sac – she, like all of the characters in Night in the Woods, has an abundance of charm and no shortage of wit.

I also wanted to talk about the platforming elements. I’m pretty lukewarm to platforming in general, but here I loved how integrated it was into the story and Mae’s character, and how it’s really just a method of vertical exploration (in the entire game there is only one tricky jump and it’s for something completely optional). On the rooftops, Mae found an abandoned float where, over the course of days, I raised baby rats. Mae met Lonni and Germ, and had adventures with them (Germ is actually my favorite character in the entire game). And every day going back and visiting these people and areas and checking up on them gives the main story some breathing room.

In fact, for people less invested in it, it might be *too much* breathing room. From a plot perspective, the game is really slow-paced; the ending is abrupt not because it comes too soon, but because the game has a lackadaisical pace until it suddenly decides to wrap things up. I agree with you that it was heavy-handed, and I don’t mind that part; but I did feel that the developers wrote themselves into a hole (in this case, literally), and their solution seemed to be to suddenly and abruptly fill the hole (again, literally). The problem was that in the late game it suddenly moves to much larger stakes than just the personal problems of its main cast, but the writers seemed to realize that focusing on this risked overwhelming all the fine detail they had built up. The ending, like the rest of the game, is consistently *interesting,* and it’s very brave (they could have easily just made a slice-of-life game and left aside the supernatural issues you mention); at the end of the day I think Night in the Woods would probably be a more *popular* game if it was just a story about a college drop-out figuring out life, but it would be less distinct.

On a final note, this game is much more reactive than it appears. There are all sorts of things you can find, or dialog choices you can take, that create differences further in the game; and unlike The Walking Dead, or Revolution 1979, or Dreamfall: Chapters, at no point does the game make any declarations about this. It presents itself as a typical adventure game, and it’s a pleasant surprise when things that seemed like one-off discursions come back in the form of character or world development.

Oh, and to answer your final question – I thought the relationship developing was handled really well. There’s always something a little oversimplification about the way games handle relationships procedurally (time spent between X and Y increases Relationship Status) but this is a lot better than a Bioware game, because the relationships are more equitable; Mae isn’t a hero solving everyone else’s problems, but rather someone in need of help who nevertheless can improve the lives of those around her (which in a sense, describes most of us).

Letter 3

Hi Dylan,

I like your observation that there is a fluid relationship between the visual and playable elements of Night in the Woods and the narrative, and I agree with you wholeheartedly that it is rare to find a game that works so well in that regard.

There are two reasons why I think a player might feel alienated from Mae: the first is that Mae has a history that the character has no control over, does not know going in and has to reckon with. In that sense, we don’t play Mae, so much as manage Mae some of the game. While many games feature playable characters with existing pasts, they don’t necessarily feature as much in the playable story. To the extent that they do, usually all of the information is there already and is basically about creating a believable premise. I think it’s likely that some players will not want to play a character who is accused by NPCs of having done something that is not yet explained– where the NPC and the character that is supposedly getting played know something the player doesn’t! That can be alienating but is not necessarily a bad design choice at all, just an observation. Secondly, you are right that Mae gets out of being a sad sac with wit and charm. Yet, many of us know someone who is precisely this way: extremely irresponsible, often to the point of unethical treatment of others, and yet very charismatic and charming. It’s one thing to encounter such a person, it’s another thing to play her. She is — in that way at least — an antihero. And while she doesn’t outright lie, I would not really typify her as earnest, sincere or honest. I’d say she is skeptical, sarcastic and often holds back. She is very likable but mainly because we can see who she is despite herself, which makes sense — teenager and all.

The slow pace of the game ended up being a lot more enjoyable than I anticipated. That lent an immersive aspect that reminded me of watching a really good TV series, where you feel like you’re with the characters and the story for a significant amount of time. I’d love to read something on the relationship between time spent with a particular media and effect, taking for granted here that there the media we consume does affect us.

A new thing I want to mention is the question of the generational skip, Mae was extremely close to her grandfather, and I feel like there’s something there to be explored. Why does a small town, middle American teenager feel most connected to her grandfather? And more specifically, how does that tie into the theme of ghosts and ghost stories? These aren’t leading questions, I don’t have answers preset in my mind. I’m really curious what you think.

Letter 4

Hey Joanna,

I definitely see what you’re saying about potential difficulties with Mae. One of the most ancient design problems in video game is how to get the player’s knowledge of the world to match their character. The straightforward way to deal with this – having other characters explain things about the world, or having the player character ask lots of questions – is clearly immersion breaking and doesn’t make diagetic sense (but lots of games do it anyway). Another common solution is to simply make the player character a blank slate, have amnesia, or themselves be a Stranger in a Strange Land, so that they learn things at the exact same time the player does. But this significantly limits the writers in how they can define a character and the situation they’re in.

Starting in media res, as Night in the Woods does, doesn’t even try to tackle this problem; instead it says, you know what, this isn’t inherently a problem for the story we’re telling, and how we’re telling it. As you said, we merely manage Mae; we are not required to leverage her knowledge of past events, or her world, and this setup engages the player with a dual mystery; one focused on the past (Mae’s past, and the past of Possum Springs) and one focused on the present (the more straightforward Whodunnit). This is a pretty classic framing for mystery stories, and the only unusual thing here is that the focus is very much on the former thread. I think the reason it wouldn’t even *occur* to me to be bothered by it is that I engage with Night in the Woods much like I engage in more passive fiction, and that has a lot to do with my expectations of the genre it occupies. If I went in expecting a roll-your-own-character RPG, and instead got this, I *would* be put out – but outside the Kickstarter PC RPG renaissance those games are still pretty rare.

I think the pacing also takes the edge off. Absent the studies you imagine (and I too would be interested in reading them), I think it’s safe to say that there is a correlation between time spent with something and how comfortable we find it (because comfort is simply pleasant familiarity). The fact that we get to spend time in Possum Springs, and with Mae, without any particular pressures or rush helps us settle in – and at the end we probably don’t want to leave. (I think this also partially explains why so many people watch TV shows well past the point when they’ve jumped the shark).

Mae’s relationship with her grandfather is actually one of the more clear-cut things in the narrative, at least if we take Lost Constellation into account. We know that Mae’s family are immigrants a few generations removed from their native land; her parents are entirely Americanized, and more or less accept everything about Possum Springs and reality as most people understand it; they are straightforward, working-class Christians. But Grandfather still retains a connection to the old country, and particularly its mythology, its folktales, and its embrace that there are things yet unseen and unknown in the world. As a precocious small child, Mae loves these stories because they are so much more interesting and evocative than what she gets at Sunday school; and I think as Mae grows up and ‘doesn’t fit in,’ there’s an increasing connection and association with the otherness of these stories. And, of course, these stories come to life in the present-day plot of the game!

One of my favorite subplots is her grandfather’s membership in the weird little tooth cult; it turns out that he did not merely retell the stories of his homeland, but also maintained the history, and created the mythology, of his new home in Possum Springs; and by passing the tooth on to her father, he too can get inducted into the role of curator and storyteller.

There’s a lot more we could say about this, but I know we both have busy lives, so I’ll just conclude that Night in the Woods is one of the most confident and enjoyable storygames I have ever played. I can already tell that it’s going to age gracefully, and I expect to be recommending it for many years to come.

Until next time,

Dylan

Notes:

An example of this from today’s gaming: I was exploring the ruins of an ancient, long-extinct civilization in The Elder Scrolls Online, and came upon some bookshelves with still-intact books. I read a few…and found that they were all contemporary, published centuries after the ruins’ occupants disappeared. The developers, it appears, had written a script to randomly insert books on bookshelves throughout the gameworld, and had either forgotten or simply not bothered to modify that script for long-uninhabited areas. Suffice it to say that this completely destroyed any immersion I had. ↩

]]>http://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/05/20/game-club-night-woods/feed/01439Game Club: Abzu - An Open Letter Serieshttp://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/03/25/the-abzu-letters/
http://www.augmented-vision.net/2017/03/25/the-abzu-letters/#respondSun, 26 Mar 2017 01:15:23 +0000http://www.augmented-vision.net/?p=1412Welcome to Game Club, where Joanna Price and myself exchange letters about a game we've jointly played. This month, we're discussing Abzu, the debut game from developer Giant Squid. Unlike previous months, all the letters are published in a single post, so you don't need to jump between websites! Letter 1 Dear Joanna, I expected [...]

Welcome to Game Club, where Joanna Price and myself exchange letters about a game we’ve jointly played. This month, we’re discussing Abzu, the debut game from developer Giant Squid. Unlike previous months, all the letters are published in a single post, so you don’t need to jump between websites!

Letter 1

Dear Joanna,

I expected Abzu to be a straightforwardly pleasant experience, but I instead found myself with mixed feelings (of the volatile, arguing-with-myself variety, as opposed to “meh.”) Before I untangle those, I want to give the game its obvious but deserved props. It’s really, really pretty.

There’s an enormous amount of color; textures manage to be both simple and high-res. The level design, while necessarily open (it’s an underwater game!) is detailed, with nooks and crannies to poke into as you explore the larger world. The character animations are pitch-perfect. The species variety is much greater than is really necessary, and one of the game’s great pleasures.This is embellished by a pleasant soundtrack by Austin Wintory (who, in the last few years, has become THE name in game composition) which is a little more ambient/generic-orchestral than some of his more daring work (The Banner Saga, Sunset), but perfectly fits the game.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, since the game loudly advertises itself as “from the art director of Journey.” Even if I hadn’t know that, the comparisons between Abzu, Journey, and Flower are inevitable—and the source of much of my criticism.

All three games cast the player as a nameless protagonist moving through colorful worlds, with minimalist exploratory gameplay/puzzle solving as the only mechanic. Each game is unusually overt about manifesting a “games-as-art” aesthetic, and both Flower and Journey were pushed by Sony as a contrast to other games (published by Sony or made for Sony platforms—this was part of the whole “it only does everything” mantra of the PS3). Flower received an inordinate amount of attention primarily because most console gamers had never seen indie sensibilities embodied in a ‘modern’ game before (insofar as they were used to it, it was intentionally retro microbudget games, ala Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved), and the fact that Sony published it made it both prominent and ‘safe.’ Flower is a lovely game, and has a unity of design and theme that is a lot harder to pull off than it seems, but it’s also slight; I think it could only really achieve greatness in its time and place.

The same is not true of Journey, which took a similar framework and added a brilliant, invisible multiplayer component, where you would encounter other travelers in your journey, played by other players, who you silently interacted with. I played through Journey in one setting, and still remember many of these social experiences; working with one player to try to reach a hard-to-find collectible, ultimately failing but satisfied with the effort; of encountering a traveler whose extraordinarily long scarf marked them as a veteran, and being guided through the game’s most dangerous area by them. Next to these unscripted moments, the threadbare quest narrative was hardly notable.

I mention all of this to explain my confused reaction to Abzu, which structurally is simply Journey underwater. You access a new area, interact with a few hotspots, maybe find a hidden collectible, and access the new area. The equivalence isn’t just at a high level; there are entire segments that are more or less lifted straight from Journey; the moments in Abzu where you race along with the current play identically to Journey’s sand-surfing segments.

Yet Abzu is an entirely solitary experience; it’s Journey without its defining feature, and so it can’t help but feel like a step back. And if it seems like I’m overthinking it, it’s worth noting that there just isn’t much to *do* in Abzu; at its best it’s a meditative experience, an opportunity to explore an improbably rich and diverse underwater ecosystem and escape into it. But there’s no way to interact with any of the sea life, except by catching a ride on the larger creatures.* There are some nautilus shells to find, but there’s no indication what, if anything, they do; there are a few geysers in the seafloor that somehow spawn new species of fish, but these are just little dopamine rushes to keep you occupied. And in seeking to be accessible and forgiving of mistakes, there are no fail conditions, which makes any attempts at tension fall flat (this may have just been me metagaming too much, but when there was an “OH NO, SHARK” moment, I was like “I am swimming right out into the shark-infested waters because there is no way this game is going to kill me.”)

The game’s story is similarly unremarkable. The game restricts its cutscenes to scenes of underwater beauty, meaning that what plot or context there is is discovered by reading the murals of an ancient, extinct civilization. In 2017, the two gaming tropes I am most tired of are audio logs and “ancient mystical civilizations;” while I give the artist points for using murals rather than inexplicable underwater diaries, I was so tired of the subject matter that, for one of the first times in my gaming life, I didn’t even try to puzzle together the plot. As it is, the game is mostly a dude swimming forward, activating Ancient Switches, and forming an unearned relationship with a spectacularly stupid shark.

And yet I spent at least half the time enjoying myself. When I could silence the critical discourse in my head and just appreciate the setting, it was lovely. As soon as I exited this immersive state, or as soon as I started thinking about writing this blog entry, I was frustrated and disappointed. But I think that wasn’t “just me”—at the end of the day, it’s not clear what experience Abzu is trying to give the player and who its target audience is, and I’m honestly not sure the lead designer knew either; so we’re left with a game that is both beautiful and empty.

Let me know if your reactions jived with mine, and how you found navigating underwater!

– Dylan

* I actually didn’t figure out, until right before the end, that you could *steer* the creatures you were riding, which probably would have made this feature more fun.

Letter 2

Hey Dylan,

I had two very similar experiences to yours, so I’ll get those out of the way first:

Yes, the game is beautiful. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this except possibly that the mechanics have an aesthetic as well. The in-game world becomes pressure based through the use of the controller and that’s interesting—pushing through the world. And like you, I was also disappointed by the “hotspots,” and I was even a little resistant to the area separations. In a game that seemed to be primarily about open exploration, the division between one area and another seemed like an artificial way of mimicking some kind of “progress.”

Unlike you, I didn’t mind the alienation of being the only living thing in an apparently living world, even though I also recognized it. Games-as-Pure-Meditation don’t really bother me, in part because I spend a non-zero amount of time staring at my ceiling and spacing out as a form of entertaining myself. In fact, the attaching to creatures rather bothered me because it seemed, like the faux progress to be about faux connecting. I was comfortable with the weird dissonance of not connecting, but less excited about the pretense.

But there is another layer to Abzuthat I feel has to be noted here, even if it—like the faux progress and the faux connection to other life—is ultimately artificial. The murals on the walls in Abzutell a story that is strikingly similar to that of environmental struggles as we know them in the all-too-real world. They depict the misuse of technology to overuse natural resources. I am with you that the “mystical zomg” of the diver is obnoxious, but not because of its tropiness so much as because if you’re going to make a political commentary, I think it’s pretty cheap to offer up a “mystical zomg” solution. (And yes, “mystical zomg” is not a real phrase outside of my usage, lol)

I will say this on behalf of Abzu, outside of its beauty and meditative qualities, after I finished the game, I watched some YouTubers play through it and it was very sweet, watching them have what I would call a genuinely playful experience, in the vein of child’s exploratory play. That doesn’t happen very often in a video game. For whatever reason, video games tend to carry a certain level of innate awareness to them that precludes that sort of innocent play. It was kind of endearing to see.

I played Journey for a while, but ultimately, I shied away from it because it was multiplayer and I feel very hesitant about most multiplayer games to begin with. I’m glad I played Abzu, but mostly because it was relaxing and pretty, and less because of any artistic or political transcendence.

– Joanna

Letter 3

Hey Joanna,

While I don’t want to hijack this discussion to just be about Journey, I do want to respond to your last point. What made Journey so great was that its multiplayer was invisible—I imagine a portion of players *didn’t realize* the game was multiplayer, and thought they were just interacting with strange AI companions. Most of the negative aspects of multiplayer stem from the negative aspects of interacting with other human beings—but because Journey fundamentally restricts the actions available, these don’t come into play. It is genuinely impossible to be a dick to somebody in Journey. So I’d encourage you to give it another shot!

I don’t watch Let’s Plays, but I’m not surprised to hear that you witnessed that. One of the better aspects of LP culture is that streamers are encouraged to seek out games that will surprise them, because (outside of esports/speedrunning) it’s much more interesting for the audience to see a streamer react to the unexpected rather than just do what they always do. This means you have a lot of people poking their head into indie games who have only played conventional titles, and when you have a console-focused game like Abzu, it’s that much more likely to happen. It is definitely nice to see, and I think it illustrates that most of my issues with Abzu stem not really from the game itself, but from me having played many similar titles, and so Abzu suffers simply because I’ve played better or more interesting ones.

And I think at the end of the day, that’s my main issue. Abzu, for its many charms, isn’t very interesting. I enjoyed much of my time for it, and would even wish for more games that occupy this space, but I didn’t form any attachments, don’t have any fond memories, and have honestly struggled to produce thoughtful criticism in response to it. It’s a game that is both very competent and largely unambitious. I think we run into the problem of the small studio again; they had to focus limited resources, and in Abzuthe vast majority was spent on art and animation, with sound as a second and everything else as a distant third (you can tell by the credits, in which the art team dwarfs the others). Abzu wants to deliver a pleasant experience that anyone can access—but that accessibility comes not simply at the cost of depth (no pun intended), but at why I might call “stakes.” This is the anti-roguelike; there is nothing to gain and nothing to lose. There is something admirable about the purity of this, and for this reason I found the achievements obnoxious—Journey wisely did not have them, realizing they’d pollute the self-guided exploration with external goals. One of the problems with console-focused titles is that both Microsoft and Sony now mandate achievements; even if it’s not in the game’s best interests, you have to include them if you want to release on their platforms. Unsurprisingly, I think this sort of meddling in game design is terrible for the medium, and calls to mind the famous restrictions of other industries (Hays Code, CCA).

I will take your word that the murals were thoughtful, though. As I said, at a different time I would have tried to puzzle them out, but I’m not a visual learner at the best of times, and didn’t have enough faith that the effort required would produce something worthwhile. Perhaps I was wrong!

Thanks,
Dylan

P.S. I do love the squids, though.

Letter 4

Hey Dylan,

While Journey does not indicate upfront that it is multiplayer, it would be very hard for most players of the game to not know it was multiplayer in this spoilerverse. Indeed, your own reference to your own experiences of Journey premised much of their worth on the silent multiplayer interaction, not on the single player experience.

I think simply not engaging with the murals at all in Abzuchanges the game because you (the diver) feature heavily in the murals, so they are attempting to inform your experience of playing a character. This character has some political culpability and is seeking to rectify a mistake. The player is thus not playing herself in Abzuwithin the context of the murals, but is more or less playing herself in an Abzuwhere the murals aren’t there. But as I said in my previous letter, that doesn’t mean they’ve done a bang up job of it, simply that it was an intentional aspect of the world building and character structure. I’m not saying there is a “right” way to play the game. I’m also not a visual learner, my preferred parts of the game also did not involve decoding the political message of the murals.

I agree the achievements were obnoxious. I think the collectibles would have been more interesting if instead of pre-designating what they were, you could collect a multitude of things but you are constrained by what you can carry, allowing you to “curate” a collection. I also kind of chafed at the animal riding and the area delineating, as I mentioned. The less open the world, the more it tainted that admirable purity you speak of.

I didn’t know achievements were mandated, man is that a sign of the times, or what?